Abstract: Health professionals need competencies in improvement skills if they are to contribute usefully to improving patient care. Medical education programmes in the USA have not systematically taught improvement skills to residents (registrars in the UK). The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has recently developed and begun to deploy a competency based model for accreditation that may encourage the development of improvement skills by the 100 000 residents in accredited programmes. Six competencies have been identified for all physicians, independent of specialty, and measurement tools for these competencies have been described. This model may be applicable to other healthcare professions. This paper explores patterns that inhibit efforts to change practice and proposes an educational model to provide changes in management skills based on trainees’ analysis of their own work.

This is a reprint of an article by then ACGME executive director Dr. David C. Leach, published in 2001 in Quality in Health Care, and it is available free online:
Leach DC. Changing education to improve patient care. Qual Health Care. 2001 Dec;10 Suppl 2:ii54-8.This was a special supplement entitled: Leadership and Learning, and it is available free online.

Here is another article from a recent issue of Postgraduate Medical Journal, also available online:
Swanwick T. See one, do one, then what? Faculty development in postgraduate medical education. Postgrad Med J 2008 Jul;84(993):339-43.
Interest in the development of medical educators working in the postgraduate sector is running high. Driven by three interlinked trends–the professionalization of medical education, increasing accountability, and the pursuit of educational excellence–there is a growing need for high quality and sustained faculty development programmes across the network of education providers. Postgraduate medical education has a number of unique features that set it apart from undergraduate medicine, to which faculty development programmes need to cater. The key issue for the future will be how to engage the service in the business of education. Widespread cultural change is required and this will require effective and sympathetic leadership from postgraduate training institutions, hospitals and health authorities.